From the fine folks in California who want to crucify illegal immigrants and also set up a Bear Patrol comes this:
The plan: a California ballot initiative that would end public benefits for illegal immigrants, cut off welfare payments for their children and impose new rules for birth certificates.
“We will be out in full force to qualify this initiative,” said Barbara Coe, who helped develop Proposition 187, the 1994 measure that would have ended benefits to illegal immigrants but was ruled unconstitutional. “Illegals and their children are costing the state billions of dollars. It’s invasion by birth canal.”
Supporters of the initiative, recently unveiled by San Diego political activist Ted Hilton, hope to challenge the citizenship of children born in the United States to parents who are here illegally.
The 14th Amendment states that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and the State wherein they reside.” Backers of the initiative argue that illegal residents are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States and that, as a result, their U.S.-born children should not be citizens.
Key paragraph is the last one, because unsurprisingly, the idiots backing this have no idea what they’re talking about. “Subject to the jurisdiction thereof” means that the laws of the United States are applicable to them. Last I checked, if an illegal immigrant committed a crime, he was still criminally liable for the punishment.
(For the sake of comparison, when the amendment was being discussed after the Civil War, the chief area of concern was how this would apply to members of Indian nations who were not American citizens; those living within Indian territory would not be subject to the jurisdiction of the United States and therefore not citizens. It was actually written specifically to avoid naturalizing Indians who didn’t have citizenship and didn’t want it. This is the rare moment where a coincidence people would call “ironic” is actually ironic!)
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If its “invasion by birth canal” how do we build a wall there? do we teach only immigrants about condoms, or can american children learn too? won’t someone think of the (unwanted) children!
Illegal Immigration is one of the few times that I actually understand what the wrong-wing is trying to accomplish here, even though they are going about it in the most intellectually retarded manner possible.
And what makes their case even more ridiculous is that these wrong-wing militia groups never seem to form along the USA/Canadian border or go after Illegal Immigrants from European countries. This complete lack of legal consistency (a patented wrong-wing process) makes it easier for left-wingers to decry this as a civil liberties issue, which wrong-wingers always lose in the long run.
The only question these wrong-wingers should ask is what happens if two convicts escape from prison and meet up on the outside and have a baby? Does the presence of a child somehow negate the crimes the parents committed to the point of letting them go to raise their child? Or do you put the child in foster care and put the parents back in prison?
If the wrong-wing wanted to reduce the number of Illegal Immigrants coming in from Latin and South American countries, they should produce a shockumentary with as much slant as the old Reefer Madness video about “The (non-existent) Horrors of the American Child Welfare System”, translate it into the Latin and South American dialects and distribute it to as many places south of the border as they can as an attempt to scare people into not risking their children’s well-being.
I’m sure Governor Sanford could distribute a few copies on his next “business trip” down there.
I could give a deep, serious analysis on a crucial issue (specially for latinos like myself)…
I could try to make a witty, scathing remark about stupid, evil right wing nuts…
I could even go the easy way out and repeat MGK’s points, and maybe suck up to him a bit…
But i can only giggle at Zenrage’s “wrong-wing”, and, of course, any mention of Stanford (whose naili’ of a fellow countrywoman made Argentina appear on the Daily Show! wooooo!)
Would it then be the case that a foreign diplomat’s child born in the US would not be “subject to the jurisdiction thereof”, if that diplomat enjoyed immunity? How does diplomatic immunity work, anyway?
Just an idle curiosity.
I actually heard a bit of an interview with this guy on NPR in a comics store I was at.
The interviewer had to press the point that yes, the Constitution says that anyone born on U.S. soil is a U.S. citizen. And he’s all “Well, that’s subject to interpretation…”
John-
near as i can figure it out, you have diplomatic immunity if you’re a foreign diplomat until Danny Glover revokes it with a bullet to the chest.
So much for the beautiful picture of a USA accepting and encouraging immigration. Where everybody is allowed to live together and where even the descendants of former slaves are starting to integrate into the upper tiers of society. Appearently some yankees are just as bad as some Europeans.
Sigh.
Guess I should have known…
That’s kinda close to what someone else has actually proposed.
Well, I’d just like to apologize on behalf of my state. California’s mostly cool, but it’s in our nature that our crazy wing feels a disproportionate need to get attention.
And how does diplomatic immunity work?
“Invasion by birth canal”=Least successful invasion strategy ever. It takes nine months to get even one freaking soldier out, and when he or she gets here? Freaking wuss. Couldn’t take a five year old girl.
It’s a little known fact that Eisenhower considered invasion by birth canal for Normandy, but quickly decided against it.
Supporters of the initiative, recently unveiled by San Diego political activist Ted Hilton, hope to challenge the citizenship of children born in the United States to parents who are here illegally.
Good. I hope this sucks up a metric fuckton of dollars from bigoted idiots. The more money an ultimately pointless initiative like this sucks up the less there will be available for other initiatives where the law isn’t so clear-cut.
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Immigrants! I knew it was them! Even when it was the bears, I knew it was them!
Yes, these guys are ‘tards. No doubt.
However, if you don’t live in California, it’s easy to point the finger and call the ‘tards racist, etc. And in some cases, you’d be right. But here’s some food for thought, for someone who lived next to this problem for five years, and lived in L.A. for 38 years:
Many of the neighborhoods that have a large “Latino” population look like the poorer sections of Latin American countries. When one pays $450K for a house, one expects to upkeep the house by watering the lawn, keeping the house in good repair, etc. One doesn’t anticipate three whole families moving into one house next door, but somehow not having the resources to stop throwing garbage on your front lawn, water and mow their own lawn, and telling their kids (all ten of them, and no, I’m not exaggerating)to shut the fuck up at 11:00 p.m. instead of keeping the whole neighborhood up with their screaming, every goddam night.
You also get tired of not being able to read one sign in your neighborhood (which wasn’t a problem when you bought the house), being turned down for a job because you don’t speak Spanish, and getting an attitude from people who have been in your country for 20 years and still can’t speak English. You get tired of paying your taxes for them to get health benefits you, yourself are not eligible for, and never will be. You really get pissed off when the families next door are all three pregnant, but none of them work, and you know your taxes support them, too.
The ‘tards are going about it wrong, certainly. But they are responding to a situation we have been forced to endure for a very long time. If you don’t live in the situation, then shut up about it or live in L.A. for a few years before you open your mouth.
This has got nothing to do with immigrants, other then the fact that the immigrants that lived next to you were assholes.
The following paragraph has more tangible complaints.
The big joke is that – during a budget crisis – the people the GOP want to paint a big red bullseye on are the folks receiving the fewest services per tax dollar contributed.
Illegals come into the country, pick up their fake SS cards, start paying taxes into the system, and generally function like every other legal resident with the exception that they avoid using public services that might flag them as illegals. There are millions of them and they are very difficult to detect (without just sweeping up entire neighborhoods and sifting people out one by one).
All this talk of “getting” illegals is asinine in its futility and fruitless in its failure to reduce actual budget problems. California already drops several billion dollars a year incarcerating bike thieves and pot smokers. It’s been cranking back taxes for decades. And it still didn’t hit a real budget problem until the bottom fell out of the housing market.
The end goal here is to shut down all government services. Immigrants are just the wedge. If Californians fall for it again… well… Democracy doesn’t give you the government you need, it gives you the government you deserve.
The problem is that neighborhood characters change all the time, immigrants or no. There’s no community in Los Angeles that looks as it did when I was a kid.
I grew up in an LA suburb myself. When I was there it was largely populated by architects and general contractors (it was on the fringe of an extremely wealthy old-money neighborhood; at the time we existed to design and build their mansions).
I’ll never be able to live in my home town, because the town has now gentrified to the point that all the old modest one-story ranchers have either been demolished to make room for mini-mansions or sell unmodified for more than three-quarters of a million dollars.
It’s a shame, because I loved my town. I can imagine it would’ve been worse if the town had slid downmarket instead of gentrifying. Still, you can’t base public policy on “I wish it were 1979.”
There’s also the problem that you tend to notice the jerks. Unless you meet him somehow, you don’t notice the quiet, friendly Honduran farmer who rarely speaks because he’s embarrassed by his poor English. You do notice the guy who was a jerk in La Paz, and is now a jerk in Van Nuys. It’s akin to our collective cringe when we hear a loud, obnoxious American when we’re abroad.
Thank you for bringing up exactly the point I raised to my wife when I saw this in the local newspaper: “You honor, my client pleads illegal-immigrant. As this court has no jurisdiction over the defendant, we move that all charges be dismissed.” It is supremely ironic that political groups seeking to strengthen border security would push for such a blatant undermining of basic sovereignty.
Man is not recognized under ape law!
I wonder why the 14th Amendment is subject to this sort of abstract lingustic parsing but according to (what I am admittedly assuming to be) the same folks the 2nd Amendment has, and has alwasy had, a concrete, immutable and definate meaning that CAN NEVER BE QUESTIONED (even when the Supreme Court doesn’t agree).
Hey, L.A.! There are immigrants everywhere.You can hear the same complaints in every city on Earth. Forty years ago, where I live right now was a Greek community.
Now it’s not. You know why? Those crazy Greeks assimilated, just like immigrants always do. True, there’s still plenty of old folk around who don’t speak English. Who cares? They’re wonderful, loving, prosperous grandparents with amazing gardens and well-kept homes. Like most immigrants, they’ve been through a hell of alienation and come out strong at the other end. And their Canadian-born grandchildren speak fluent Vancouver English, and make ignorant complaints about immigrants. (The ultimate test of assimilation.)
If we’re lucky enough, those strong, beautiful people will keep on coming, making heroic leaps of faith, and sacrificing their own happiness to make a better society for their descendants.
I also think it’s sort of funny that it’s the “subject to jurisdiction” language that allowed Republicn anti-immigration and foregin-born candidate John McCain to run for President.
John, you mean Naturalized citizen John McCain, as he’s only a citizen because a law written after his birth said he was.
(Which is why I applaud the OBama Birth Certificate conspiracy folks…not the drooling morons who believe, but the mastermind douche bags who started it….it was all done as a pre-emptive strike to keep anyone from pointing out/researching/ruling on McCain’s possible ineligibility)
To be fair, the McCain citizenship business was kinda silly too, and Congress just said unanimously “Screw it, he’s a natural-born citizen” because the Democrats would look no better for pursuing this nonsense.
Sigh. These people… the Prop. 187 and Prop. 8 people really aren’t a great reflection of the rest of us Californians. Frankly, I get a hell of a lot more upset about the ridiculous ballot-initiative thing than I do about illegal immigration.
Zifnab said: “California already drops several billion dollars a year incarcerating bike thieves….” Uh… bike thieves SHOULD get the book thrown at them. Pot smokers, not so much, but stealing someone’s bike is quite possibly stealing their primary mode of transportation or even the source of their livelihood. In the Old West, you got shot for that shit.
“Subject to the jurisdiction thereof” would seem to be aimed directly at foreign diplomats, who are by definition not subject to the jurisdiction of the US; their kids are not citizens.
Zifnab nailed it. Illegal immigrants don’t use those public services that people claim they are. I lived in Miami for years, and knew plenty of illegals that were terrified of going to a hospital (even if they were about to die) because they didn’t want to risk the possibility of being asked for some form of ID that they didn’t have.
Correct. If memory serves, “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” is intended to exclude 14th Amendment protection from: (1) Indians on reservations, (2) foreign diplomats (if the Belgian ambassador to the U.S. is a pregnant woman and happens to give birth in the U.S., the kid doesn’t automatically qualify as a U.S. citizen), and (3) foreign militaries who might invade the U.S.
If memory serves again, Hamadan v. Rumsfeld may have changed (3).
Clearly, I need to re-check the definition of “illegal.”
I am reminded of the arguments banded about a century ago about the need to stop the “anarchist”, “criminal” (and sometimes, “Jewish”) Poles, Hungarians, and Italians from immigrating to the U.S., as well as citizens of the empire of The Evil Hun (oh, and also anyone who was a Yellow Menace), thus leading to the first immigration quotas in this country and laws such as the one that affected my great-grandmother wherein a natural-born woman who married a *legal* immigrant who was not yet a citizen AUTOMATICALLY LOST HER CITIZENSHIP.
Speaking as a long-time resident of NYC, and a one-time resident of South Florida, ShellHawk needs to shut up, right now.
When I lived in a rowhouse a few years ago, one of the houses adjoining mine had far too many people living in it. They had strange-looking friends who came and went as they pleased, they played odd music cranked up enough to vibrate the walls at all hours of the day & night, they often had extended screaming arguments, they let their small kids roam the neighborhood unsupervised, we never could tell how many kids actually lived there at any given time, their command of the English language was not good, they ran an unofficial tattoo parlor on the front stoop, and were almost certainly selling drugs out the back door.
Illegal immigrants? Legal immigrants?
No. Native-born white trash.
“So much for the beautiful picture of a USA accepting and encouraging immigration. ”
The US (and most areas, really) has a long, long history of new immigrants being hated by the slightly older immigrants. It’s a different group every time.